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Pat Mulcahy, pictured attending to one of the many wild boar on his farm at Ballinwillin.

By Sean Ryan

With our Irish ancestors having lived on a diet of wild boar, Mitchelstown farmer Pat Mulcahy, is doing his bit to put the delicacy back on the menu.

Pat runs Ireland's only commercial wild boar farm, supplying some of the top Michelin star restaurants with their produce. And Pat told how he is passionate about making the beasts popular again.

"They were part of our diet thousands of years ago. When Ireland was covered in forest, our ancestors lived on boars and deer," he said.

"Torc is Irish for boar and is in a huge amount of Irish place names. That shows how prevalent they were in Ireland at one time. They have been extinct for 300 to 400 years but we set up our farm after bringing in boar from Hungary in 1995. We also have about 450 deer here, 800 animals in total," he said, adding that deer and boar were the first two meats we had in our diets, "so it is great to be able to produce them here again," he said.

Pat, his wife Miriam and their three adult children run the busy Ballinwillin House Farm in Mitchelstown which is also a popular guesthouse and the site for the annual Indiependence Music Festival.

The house is set on 80 acres and here they raise deer, as well as rare-breed pigs and geese. Pat says he was inspired to bring wild boar back to Ireland after a business trip to Hungary where he runs a small vineyard.

"We sell a lot of produce online and we sell to hotels and restaurants. It is a different kind of meat," he emphasised.

Pat will feature on the RTE Farming programme 'Ear to The Ground' on RTE One later this month.

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